Hikaru Suzuki: The Family as Experimental Form
This November, we are delighted to present two works from contemporary filmmaker Hikaru Suzuki, whose diverse body of work has dealt with themes of distance, disaster, and the interfaces between the personal, the social and the historical. Alongside filmmaking, Suzuki runs the screening organization Experimental Film Culture in Japan, and is currently a candidate in the doctoral program of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, researching the development of the essay film.
The two works in the program, God, Father and Me (2008) and Anrakuto (2011), center on the family, which they investigate as a complex of intimacies, expectations, conventions and deviations. Combining documentary, retelling, and choreographed re-enactment, God, Father and Me reflects on the filmmaker’s own family and the absence of his father who left to pursue a life as a spiritual healer, while Anrakuto is based on a young woman’s memories of a Korean helper named Hiroshi, whose presence in her household both supplemented and unsettled the dynamic of her family.
Recalling canonical experimental documentaries on the family such as Kyoko Michishita’s Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within My Family and Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, in Suzuki’s drifting narratives, often structured by the motion of walking or driving, the family emerges less as a coherent system than as a constellation of individual trajectories and their unpredictable entanglements. Winding roads and abandoned interiors somehow mirror the excess of these personal and opaque recollections, which resist the sense-making structures - such as documentary or memoir – devised to contain them.
The family also holds up a mirror to wider social realities. In God, Father and Me, Suzuki’s father’s career as a small-time religious healer for hire diverts care from his immediate family towards a community of paying spiritual devotees, hinting at a craving for paternalistic care among neoliberal society and its excessive demands on its citizens for self-reliance. Similarly, in Anrakuto, the unusual triangulation of the speaker’s lonely mother, her emotionally distant father, and the volatile helper Hiroshi hints at a wider set of postcolonial conditions in which the Korean Hiroshi figures as an unassimilable, but also somehow indispensable, other, in a community that relies on him in many ways but persistently fails to foster conditions conducive to his self-determination.
The essayistic strategies of God and Father and Me and Anrakuto reappear across Suzuki’s oeuvre: the juxtaposition of re-enactment and retelling, embodied camerawork, and the use of film to collapse distances between places and times. “I think there is an ethics at work [in these films] that cannot be resolved by reason,” Suzuki writes. The family in this way becomes a critical medium or experimental form where desires, memories and fictions coexist in shifting configurations.
THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.
Become a member for just $5 a month to access our monthly programs, and share your thoughts on our screenings with us via Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.
Program
GOD AND FATHER AND ME, 2008, 36 min, digital, color, sound
This self-documentary centers on Suzuki’s father, who left his family to go and live on a mountain after finding God and deciding to become a spiritual healer. The film combines interviews with Suzuki’s father, mother, sister, and his father’s disciples, with footage of the mountain house in which his father went to live and conduct his religious activities. Suzuki’s father’s phone conversation with one of his disciples is depicted, as well as his explanation of the appearance of spirits in photographs. Suzuki notes the tension in his father’s religious awakening between “believing in God and becoming God himself.”
Anrakuto, 2011, 36 min, digital, color, sound
Described as the “brother” of GOD AND FATHER AND ME, Anrakuto follows the voice of a young woman who is interviewed about her relationship to a man named Hiroshi, a Korean immigrant who was taken into her household by her mother during her teenage years, unsettling the dynamic of the family. These intimate recollections are paired with landscape shots and ambiguous re-enactments by a cast of actors. The film was screened at Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2015, the Un Certain Regard section at TAMA CINEMA FORUM 2012, and Cine Drive independent film festival in Osaka (2012), where it won the Grand Prize.
Hikaru Suzuki
Hikaru Suzuki has been in the Doctoral Program of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts since 2023 and researches the Development of “Essay-Film“ in the Western and Non-Western Worlds. He participated in a video letter project initiated by Dir. Nele Wohlatz in Germany with an artist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Covid 19 era in 2020. The video letter project between Buenos Aires and Fukushima, Yokohama" was selected for the "35th Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Buenos Aires)". Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has made it his life's work to film the people and transformation of Landscape of Fukushima, and continues to do it. He is currently working as an organizer and programmer for the Japanese screening organization "Experimental Film Culture in Japan" since 2019.